Around the Blawgosphere: Student Blog Breaking Ethical Ground?; Funny Lawyer Videos; 10% Truth
Blogging Around an Ethical Issue
At Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites, the Boston College Law School alum takes note of a new blogging venture at his alma mater. Anusia Hirsch, a 2L, started bclabstudent last month about her job at the school’s legal assistance bureau. She wants her blawg to be a guide to other students who might want to work there. But she realized that she really wanted to blog about her work with her clients, which “most legal bloggers know better [than] to do.” Hirsch realized this as well and consulted her supervising attorneys. They worked out an arrangement where the client OKs her posts in advance.
“A spokesperson for BC Law says this is the first law student blog that includes sanitized yet open discussions of client experiences in a sanctioned format such as this,” Ambrogi writes.
Law Blogger Named Lawyers.com Editor in Chief
The new editor in chief of Lawyers.com and Martindale.com announced at his eponymous Larry Bodine LawMarketing Blog that he’d taken the job.
“You have to be writer at heart to publish a blog for seven years and to update it once a day,” Bodine wrote. “LexisNexis has given me an opportunity to return to my original calling as a journalist.”
Bodine is a former ABA Journal editor and publisher and big-firm marketer who was most recently a working and blogging law firm consultant based in Glen Ellyn, Ill. He calls his new position “the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Bodine writes that even though he’s taken this new position, he doesn’t intend to stop posting at his blawg, which we honored in our first, second and third annual Blawg 100 features.
Maybe Only 10 Percent True?
Texas trial consultant Rita Handrich shared a new study from New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (reported in Science Daily) this week asserting that “when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society,” and until the 10 percent tipping point is surpassed, the new idea doesn’t stand a chance. And Handrich also shared her opinion at The Jury Room that the findings didn’t bear out. It doesn’t account for other 10 percent-plus segments of the population having opposing unshakable beliefs. She finds examples in history. “What about owning slaves? Certainly more than 10 percent agreed with that. And women’s right to vote? Or child labor? Or union rights in general? … Sometimes research is our friend. And sometimes we just need to say ‘please’ and turn to a different article for practical utility.”
Funny Lawyer Videos
Bitter Lawyer staffers posted a list of their five favorite lawyer videos—either real or fictional commercials. First on the list was one of a series featuring overdramatizations of minor injuries by New York City personal injury firm Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman. Bitter Lawyer’s newest find, uploaded at the end of August, is a James Bond-themed ad for Oregon law firm Oliveros & O’Brien and featuring actor Daniel Baldwin.
But the “best one of the lot,” (at right) they say, is one that used to be able to be found on what is now the DivorceDeli website, featuring “attorney Steve Miller, who in one long sentence shreds through big firms, paralegals, and DIY forms you get from the ‘boobs’ down at the courthouse. Tacky? Yeah, but that’s what makes it work.”
Earlier this week, Miami Lawyer Brian Tannebaum found this ad for Williamsville, N.Y., divorce lawyer Dominic Saraceno with the slogan: “Don’t hate—litigate!” Tannebaum tweeted that the ad is the “answer to why people hate lawyers.”
